Michael Karl Geilenfeld, 73, the American founder of the St. Joseph’s Home for Boys orphanage in Haiti, has been sentenced to 210 years in federal prison for sexually abusing boys in his care for decades.
“He used his power. He used the color of his skin,” U.S. District Judge David Leibowitz said before sentencing Geilenfeld to prison on March 24, according to the Miami Herald.
The judge, quoting one of the convicted pedophile’s victims, said Geilenfeld had initially come across as “being a man of God.” But, according to the men who testified about how Geilenfeld abused them, the founder of their Port-au-Prince orphanage was no “man of God.”
U.S. Department of Homeland Security)
Geilenfeld, originally from Iowa, founded the orphanage in 1985 and operated it for over two decades under the guise of doing Christian missionary work. According to a 2014 News & Observer article, Geilenfeld’s Haitian orphanages were “funded by millions of dollars channeled through a Raleigh [North Carolina] nonprofit, and also supported by several Triangle churches and hundreds of volunteers and donors here.”
He repeatedly traveled from the United States to Haiti. During this time, he subjected numerous boys to sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, according to the U.S. Justice Department. In February 2025, a federal jury convicted him of one count of traveling in foreign commerce for illicit sexual conduct and six counts of engaging in illicit sexual conduct in a foreign place between 2005 and 2010. Several victims, now adults, bravely testified about the abuse they endured.
The case highlights how Geilenfeld, a U.S. citizen operating in a developing country, initially managed to evade accountability. Despite allegations surfacing over a decade ago, including a year-long detainment in Haiti in 2014, his criminal case in Haiti faltered when alleged victims did not appear for a key hearing. This allowed him to avoid justice for years, a situation that critics suggest was influenced by his ability to leverage his status as a White American in a nation with limited resources.
It was ultimately a defamation lawsuit that Geilenfeld filed against an activist who accused him of abuse that brought the evidence to the attention of federal prosecutors in Miami, leading to the child predator’s arrest in Colorado in January 2024 and eventual conviction.
This article was written with the assistance of AI.
